Thursday, July 15, 2010

Look out, Fail Whale! Amplify is like Twitter, but BETTER

Look out, Twitter!  We’ve seen the fail whale waaaaaay too often these past few weeks and people are starting to look into other ways to instantly share information online.  Enter Amplify, whose popularity has seemingly grown tremendously recently.  I’m definitely using it - I’d guess 90% of my Tweets in the last week were autoposted from Amplify.
Amplify is like Twitter, but better.  Here’s why:

-It has a Simple Bookmarklet that you drag and drop into your browser; when you are on a page you want to amplify, you click it and are immediately given the options to Clip This Page, Share the URL, Write a Post, and Microblog.
    -Clip this page: When you’re reading an article and come across a great paragraph (or several paragraphs) that you simply can’t condense into 140 characters, you can clip exactly what you want, comment on it, and send it out - the title is used as your tweet
    -Share the URL - Similar to Clip This Page except instead of attaching the paragraphs you clipped, just the url is attached
    -Write a post: WYSIWYG - just like writing a blog post
    -Microblog: Just like sending a Twitter update, but it gives you 500 characters

-Customization: Like Twitter you can post an avatar and background, but unlike Twitter, you can have all your social media links on your profile and add widgets, CSS, etc.
-Easy integration with other social media tools - you can choose for your Amp to auto post to Twitter, FB, Google Buzz, Posterous, Tumblr, Ping.fm, Plurk, Friendfeed, Diigo, Delicious and use your bit.ly account!
    -You can also find friends who are using Amplify through Twitter, FB, and Google
    .-Signing in and customizing your content from other tools is a breeze.

-And just this morning, I was thinking about how I wanted my Amps to post to my blog and in the afternoon, as if reading my mind, Amplify announced that it will now autopost to Blogger and Wordpress!!!

This is huge for me!  I’ve wanted to get back into blogging more but it’s hard for me to find the time.  A lot of what I blog is sharing articles and reacting to them - which is exactly what Amplify does!  So not only am I posting to Twitter and people who follow me as a source on Amplify, I’m also adding more frequent content to my blog.

Amplify is run by WordPress which is why it has so many great features and is so easy and familiar to use.  With the new ability to autopost to blogs, Amplify has the potential to reach millions more people and it makes me optimistic for future features and third party apps to come.  Top of my wishlist is lists for organizing your sources and a Tweetdeck-type application to view them.

So anyway, these are just SOME of the reasons Amplify is better than Twitter, and many other social media tools - I’m still learning and exploring the features and LOVING all the functionality!  I mean, Look at me, I’m actually sitting down to write a full blog post with NO links! So what are you waiting for?? Get Amped!

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